Is there a good way to persist printer settings in a Swing app?

We are using the new Java printing API which uses PrinterJob.printDialog(attributes) to display the dialog to the user.

Wanting to save the user's settings for the next time, I wanted to do this:

PrintRequestAttributeSet attributes = loadAttributesFromPreferences();
if (printJob.printDialog(attributes)) {
    // print, and then...

    saveAttributesToPreferences(attributes);
}

However, what I found by doing this is that sometimes (I haven't figured out how, yet) the attributes get some bad data inside, and then when you print, you get a white page of nothing. Then the code saves the poisoned settings into the preferences, and all subsequent print runs get poisoned settings too. Additionally, the entire point of the exercise, making the settings for the new run the same as the user chose for the previous run, is defeated, because the new dialog does not appear to use the old settings.

So I would like to know if there is a proper way to do this. Surely Sun didn't intend that users have to select the printer, page size, orientation and margin settings every time the application starts up.

Edit to show the implementation of the storage methods:

private PrintRequestAttributeSet loadAttributesFromPreferences()
{
    PrintRequestAttributeSet attributes = null;

    byte[] marshaledAttributes = preferences.getByteArray(PRINT_REQUEST_ATTRIBUTES_KEY, null);
    if (marshaledAttributes != null)
    {
        try
        {
            @SuppressWarnings({"IOResourceOpenedButNotSafelyClosed"})
            ObjectInput objectInput = new ObjectInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(marshaledAttributes));

            attributes = (PrintRequestAttributeSet) objectInput.readObject();
        }
        catch (IOException e)
        {
            // Can occur due to invalid object data e.g. InvalidClassException, StreamCorruptedException
            Logger.getLogger(getClass()).w